The background description provided herein is solely for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the illustrative embodiments of the disclosure. Aspects of the background description are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the claimed subject matter.
A sawmill or lumber mill is a facility in which logs are cut to form lumber. In a typical conventional sawmill, one or more circular sawblades may be driven by a blade drive shaft and may each include multiple cutting teeth. The sawblade may be rotated against the end of a log such that the cutting teeth longitudinally cut the log into multiple lumber pieces. The cutting teeth on the sawblade each typically has a convex tooth back, a typically straight tooth face which extends from the tooth back in the radial direction toward the center of the sawblade, and a concave tooth gullet which extends from the tooth face of each cutting tooth to the tooth back of the forwardly-adjacent cutting tooth. A tooth tip may extend along the tooth face. The tooth tip may protrude beyond the tooth back and both of the side surfaces of the sawblade.
Before initial use of the sawblade, as well as after periods of use, the tooth tip of each cutting tooth may require grinding to achieve a precise outer diameter (O.D.) of the saw blade. This may be particularly important in cutting applications in which multiple sawblades are placed adjacent to each other on the blade drive shaft with the cutting teeth on the sawblades typically disposed in staggered relationship to each other. In such applications, it may be necessary to achieve the same O.D. for all of the sawblades on the blade drive shaft to attain optimum cutting results and sawblade life and efficiency.
The tooth tips of the cutting teeth on a circular sawblade may be grinded using a standard or conventional blade grinding machine. The blade grinding machine may have a machine interior which is selectively closeable by deployment of a machine door. A grinding tool having a grinding disk, along with a sawblade carriage and a sawblade clamp, may be provided in the machine interior. The sawblade carriage may be configured to support the sawblade in the machine interior and selectively transport the sawblade along a horizontal X-axis travel path toward and away from the grinding disk of the grinding tool. The grinding disk may be selectively movable along the X-axis travel path toward the sawblade carriage. The sawblade clamp may be situated to the side of the X-axis travel path from the sawblade carriage to the grinding disk. The sawblade clamp may be configured and movable along a horizontal Y-axis and operable to engage one or both side surfaces of the sawblade to stabilize the sawblade on the sawblade carriage.
In a typical grinding operation, the stopping point of the tooth tip on each cutting tooth relative to the grinding disk on the grinding tool may determine the quantity or thickness of material which is removed from the tooth tip. Often, thicknesses of hundreds or thousandths of an inch may be removed from the tooth tip of each cutting tooth. Thus, consistently and uniformly locating the tooth tip of each cutting tooth on the sawblade at the same distance from the grinding disk in order to achieve a precise O.D. of the sawblade or to achieve removal of a uniform thickness of material from cutting teeth of different sawblades may be critical. The machine operator typically must discern through experience the proper stopping point for the sawblade carriage in order to place the tooth tip at the correct distance with respect to the grinding disk of the grinding tool. Elucidating the correct stopping point for the sawblade carriage, however, is a laborious and time-consuming exercise and typically must be repeated for each sawblade. Moreover, because it is verified visually, the distance between the sawblade carriage and the grinding disk is vulnerable to variations from sawblade to sawblade as well as between operators of the blade grinding machine.
Therefore, blade stop devices and methods for stopping a sawblade at a predetermined stopping point relative to a grinding disk on a grinding tool of a sawblade grinding machine to facilitate consistent removal of a desired quantity or thickness of material from blade teeth on different sawblades are needed.